In Panamanian Militarism, Carlos Guevara Mann contends that Panama’s recent bouts with authoritarian regimes were not phenomena “isolated in the late twentieth century.” Instead, he suggests that colonial Panama inherited from Spain a legacy of political instability that has translated over time into an “authoritarian political tradition” (pp. xvi-xviii, 201).
To begin his work, Guevara employs a number of secondary sources to accentuate Panama’s historical inability to govern itself; and the tendency of foreigners, including Spaniards, Colombians, and North Americans, to intervene and to capitalize on this perpetual problem of political legitimacy. His discussion then moves to Panama’s transition from a more primitive, “predatory” military state, characterized by caudillos (p. 46), to “institutional militarism,” a more recent, professionalized version of its predatory precursor (pp. 55-58). Guevara concludes by arguing that the United States caused this transition, perpetrating and worsening militarism in Panama by intervening more regularly and more thoroughly than had Panama’s earlier colonial taskmasters, Spain and Colombia.
The book convincingly depicts Panama’s military as an integral component of an evolving sovereign republic, rather than as a historical aberration that began in 1968. In the process, however, the author seriously underestimates and underutilizes the depth, breadth, and quality of Panamanian historiography. Panama’s Archivos de Relaciones Exteriores and its Contraloría General de la República, for example, house a wealth of primary documentation that would have further bolstered the author’s treatment of Panamanian-U.S. relations. Guevara similarly ignores numerous secondary analyses by Alfredo Castillero Calvo, María del Carmen Mena García, Ricaurte Soler, Brittmarie Janson Pérez, Christopher Ward, John Major, Luis Navas, Armando Muñóz Pinzón, Hernando Franco Muñóz, and a host of other scholars. These studies would have provided a broader, more convincing framework for a discussion of contemporary Panama.
Guevara exacerbates his failure to use these sources when he suggests, “unfortunately, of the sum of Panama’s historical studies, few conform to the scientific method” (p. xii). He calls those few authors he agrees with “authoritative” while referring derisively to those he disagrees with as “apologists for the military” (p. xiii). Panamanian Militarism, however, incorporates far too little of the available primary and secondary documentation to sustain these types of judgments. This reviewer suspects that more careful, evenhanded consideration of available sources would have checked the vehemence of the author’s prose and his willingness to categorize other scholars.
Similarly, Guevara does not incorporate the ideas of several theoreticians whose works would have provided much-needed analytical breadth to his study. Samuel Huntington, Talcott Parsons, Amos Perlmutter, Valerie Plave Bennett, Morris Janowitz, Bruce Porter, and many other social scientists have written extensively on civil-military relations in developing nations, and by ignoring these sources, Guevara fails to tie his work into a broader theoretical framework that would have enhanced the conceptual breadth and viability of his analysis.
Panamanian Militarism lacks depth and breadth bibliographically and theoretically. Although this is a common fault in a student in the early stages of graduate training, this reviewer wonders why the editors at Ohio University Press did not correct these problems during the review and editorial processes. Despite the problems, however, Guevara accurately depicts Panama’s recent military regimes in a historical context, and this book will be of considerable use and interest to students of Panamanian history, particularly the history of Panamanian-U.S. relations.
